The legendary story of Gertrude Stein’s life has been told so often that it’s become a piece of Americana. But who was the real Gertrude Stein?

Inspired by her own extensive research, Linda Wagner-Martin’s ground-breaking biography illuminates Stein as we’ve never seen her before: growing up in a German-Jewish patriarchal family, an undergraduate at Radcliffe, as an odd sort of feminist, as a medical student at John Hopkins University, as a lesbian and a lover – as a person and not just an icon.

Offering new insights into her relationship with Matissa, Picasso, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, this fascinating portrait of Gertrude Stein’s life offers a rich history of the Stein Corporation. Throughout, her relationship with two of her older brothers shapes her emotional existence, just as her commitment to writing shaped her intellectual life. This biography also gives us a chilling new account of Gertrude Stein’s and Alice Toklas’s survival during World War II in France, and Leo Stein’s in Italy.

Favored Strangers is a story of survival — creative, psychological, cultural, sexual — that opens our eyes to what being a female and an outsider at the turn of the century, and through much of its turbulent early years, truly meant. If you thought you knew the story of Gertrude Stein, this book proves you wrong.

Praise for Favored Strangers
‘Clear, lively and comprehensive’ Kirkus Reviews

‘The information Wagner-Martin supplies is… new and thought-provoking’ London Review of Books